Our eighth invitation-only trade show organized in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Italian Flavor Forum VIII, took place on November 14, 2007 at the Museo ItaloAmericano (Italian American Museum), located in the Landmark Building C of Fort Mason, in the heart of the cool San Francisco Marina district.

The Museum is currently exhibiting hand carved and painted wooden nativity scenes from Val Gardena, in the Dolomite area of the Italian Alps, thus the guests sampled the wines and other Italian specialties presented, wandering among gorgeous artisanal pieces which reminded us that Christmas is rapidly approaching.

The weather was great, and actually unusually hot for a November afternoon in San Francisco.

The Event

Wines from Azienda Agricola Montalpruno with one of the hand-carved wooden nativity scenes
from Valgardena, Italy, in exhibition at the Museo ItaloAmericano in San Francisco, CA

At WineCountry.IT we are very pleased to observe that the guests who participate to the Italian Flavor Forum shows are more and more professionals who are truly interested in the quality Italian wine and food products introduced. The turnout was very satisfying, with the first guests actually sneaking in before the official 2PM show opening, and continuing steadily until closing time, at 6 PM.

The sparkling and light white wine desk, opened the 'tasting path' at the Italian Flavor Forum VIII.
In the center, WineCountry.IT vice-president, John Dawdy with MDM Distribution's, Melanie Moffett.

This time around we introduced 66 wines, including two white sparkling Proseccos, three frothy Lambrusco (one rosé and two red), 16 dry whites, 36 red and 4 dessert wines, from 8 different Italian wine regions.

Jenny Snodgrass, WineCountry.IT sales executive for Marin County (right) with a guest.

The feedback sheets which were filled in and returned by a large number of guests, testify to the fact that all products presented were appreciated, widely by some (WOW! and GREAT!!!! at times were often written in place of the actual numeric evaluation), more moderately by others. The highest average score topped at 90.2 points on a 100-point scale, while the lowest stopped at 75.2. When collecting feedback from a large number of tasters, with different professional and/or personal interests in wine, average points tend to be fairly low, as it's enough to have one score of 70 with nine 90-point scores, to lower the average to score to 88, add an 80, and the average drops to 87. This said, we are happy with the scores reported below.

I am pleased to notice that the gap between maximum and minimum score is not as huge as it used to be when we organized the first event about one and a half year ago, in some cases there is actually almost an agreement across the board. I would like to think that our Italian Flavor Forums have contributed to familiarizing some San Francisco Bay Area professional tasters with Italian wines. In addition, though there is a lot more interest in red wines compared to white wines and I am pleased that the 16 white selections presented, generally speaking, received what I consider a fair score.

MDM Distribution principal, Melanie Moffett (left)

Alberto Malvestio, WineCountry.IT sales executive for the San Francisco East Bay

The Blind Tasting

Two Italian and three US experts participated in the blind tasting face-off between two North American and three Italian wines. The wines were supposed to be six, but a bottle of Niebaum-Coppola Captain Reserve Merlot 2004 mysteriously disappeared from the museum library, where the blind tasting was set up, so we had to make do with only two US wines.

The Sangiovese Il Palio 2004 by Martin & Weyrich Winery from Paso Robles came out ahead with the total score of 40.7 points, or an average of 8.14 on a 10-point scale, with points ranging from 9.5 to 7.

Splitting the two sets of scores, the US team would have assigned the victory to the winner, while for the Italian judges the best was the Barengo Toscana IGT 2005 by Tenuta La Carlina.